Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend

“[Miller] draws on Wilder’s unpublished autobiography, existing letters written to her daughter and to her husband on the few occasions she traveled without him, and her fiction and ‘newspaper stories, local histories, land records,’ which he mines to create an impressively detailed context for her life. . . . Miller does not try to make her any more––or less––than she was, and that is the virtue of his biography.”––Washington Post Book World

“Miller’s absorbing new biography . . . puts the author’s early years in context before focusing on her adult life as a farmer’s wife, mother, journalist and budding author. . . . Miller uncovers facts about Laura’s life that were not revealed in her own work, and he places her experience in a broader context. He makes her days on the frontier and the farm come alive with statistics on population and demographics as well as rich details about Indians and wildlife.”––In These Times